“I am not to be loved,” he said. “Good-bye once more to that dream. And let me try to do my duty, and be in some way useful to my fellow-creatures. Half my life has been swallowed up by egotistical regrets. May God give me grace to use the remnant of it more wisely.”
He had told Eleanor that as soon as Laura was a little better he should take her to the sea-side.
“The poor child cannot remain here,” he said; “every gossip in the neighbourhood will be eager to know why the wedding is postponed; and unless we assign some simple reason for the change in our arrangements, there will be no limit to people’s speculations and conjectures. Laura’s illness will be the best possible excuse; and I will take her to the south of France. She may forget Launcelot Darrell by-and-by, when she finds herself in a strange place, surrounded by new associations.”
Eleanor eagerly assented to this.
“Nothing could be wiser than such an arrangement,” she answered. “I almost think the poor girl would die if she remained here. Everything reminds her of her disappointment.”
“Very well, then, I shall take her to Nice as soon as she is well enough to go. Will you tell her that I mean to do so, and try and make her feel some interest in the idea of the change?”
Eleanor Monckton had a very hard time of it in the sick room. Those frivolous people who feel their misfortunes very acutely for the time being, are apt to throw a heavy share of their burden upon the shoulders of their friends. Laura’s lamentations were very painful and not a little monotonous to hear; and there was a great deal of hard work to be done in the way of going over the same ground again and again, for that young lady’s consolation. She had no idea of turning her face to the wall and suffering in silence. Her manner had none of that artificial calm which often causes uneasiness to those who watch a beloved sufferer through some terrible crisis. Everything reminded her of her grief; and she would not be courageous enough to put away the things that recalled her sorrows. She could not draw a curtain over the bright picture of the past, and turn her face resolutely to the blank future. She was forever looking back, and bewailing the beauty of that vanished hope, and insisting that the dream palace was not utterly ruined; that it might be patched up again somehow or another; not to be what it was before; that was impossible, of course; but to be something. The broken vase could surely be pieced together, and the scent of the faded roses would hang round it still.
“If he repents, I will marry him, Eleanor,” she said, at the end of almost every argument, “and we will go to Italy and be happy together, and he will be a great painter. Nobody would dare to say he had committed a forgery if he was a great painter like Holman Hunt, or Mr. Millais. We’ll go to Rome together, Nelly, and he shall study the old masters, and sketch peasants from the life; and I won’t mind even if they’re pretty; though it isn’t pleasant to have one’s husband always sketching pretty peasants; and that will divert his mind, you know.”
For four days Laura was ordered to keep to her bed, and during that time Eleanor rarely quitted the invalid’s apartments, only taking brief snatches of rest in an easy-chair by the fire in Laura’s dressing-room. On the fifth day Miss Mason was allowed to get up, and then there were terrible scenes to be gone through; for the young lady insisted upon having her trousseau spread out upon the bed, and the chair, and the sofas, and hung upon every available peg in the two rooms; until both those apartments became a very forest of finery, about which the invalid prowled perpetually, indulging in a separate fit of weeping over each garment.
“Look at this darling parasol, Nelly,” she cried, gazing at the tiny canopy of silk and whalebone with streaming eyes; “isn’t the real point lace over the pale pink silk lovely? And then it’s so becoming to the complexion, too! Oh, how happy I thought I should be when I had this parasol. I thought I should drive on the Corso with Launcelot, and now——! And the violet satin boots with high heels, Nelly, made on purpose to wear with my violet silk dress; I thought nobody could be unhappy with such things as those, and now!”